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Wednesday, November 10, 2004

The Nature of Nova Scotia House

I wake up because there is something stark and silvery shining in my eyes. I fumble in the darkness and my glasses, to turn the fuzzy brightness into a sharp outline. I realize it's a planet whose path has dropped it into my window, a temporary peeping face.

In the morning, the usual path of the tide is interrupted, stayed by a thin sheet of ice eight feet wide. Ripples and waves spread around it, but at the edges is stillness. The rocks and seaweed of the inlets are saran-wrapped in ice that has maintained the curve it created when there was water beneath it. It bows upward like the hull of a Viking longboat.

The moss under the pine tree is three inches thick, lime-green. I lie down on it, and see that it's made up of billions of infinitesimal botanical feathers. The balsam cones that fall on it are pulled down into the moss, which wraps them in minute fronds tugging the sap-sticky cones deep into the velvet layers. If I stay here long enough, I'd be pulled in too, to nourish the dense, soft quilt of vegetation...